Tag Archives: economics

Dear world, on behalf of economists I offer an apology. More than anything or anyone else, we are responsible for the clusterfuck that has been 2016.

Since the 1980s we said that inequality didn’t matter. That working and middle class people would be fine if their incomes didn’t worsen even as those in the top 10% (and especially 1%) saw their own income and wealth skyrocket to levels not seen since the Gilded Age. We did not see that people did not view their lot in absolute but in relative terms. We expected them to accept our logic, and acted dumbfounded when they didn’t express gratitude for the few tiny drops of prosperity that trickled down. We never imagined that they’d be rightfully pissed. Then we blamed them for living beyond their means to catch up with the Joneses, for being irresponsible for maxing their credit cards and taking out mortgages on houses they couldn’t afford. We never saw inequality as a psychological problem as much as an economic one.

We called anyone who disagreed a socialist.

Around that same time, we said that free markets were a panacea for growth. True, many countries did benefit heavily from globalization and certainly those countries that did not follow certain basic rules of market logic have fared terribly (Venezuela being a case in point). But globalization was not a panacea for the working and middle classes of the developed world. In our smugness, we said that the lost jobs either to China, Mexico, or technology were a necessary evil for continued productivity growth. We acted like it was their fault that they did not have the skills needed for the new economy, and that it was nobody’s responsibility to find them those skills either. In the dog eat dog world of neoliberal economics there are losers, and we could afford not to be those losers becomes economists are still not being outsourced to India or replaced by robots so we had little empathy for those who were less lucky. We applauded that unemployment fell and didn’t care that it was because people lost stable, salaried jobs and became self-employed with zero benefits. We cared more about the Dow Jones than the Gini index.

We called anyone who disagreed a socialist.

We also assumed that everyone was rational. We even had a name for this species of humanity that always took decisions based on all available information, weighed all options, and picked the one that maximized their utility: homo economicus. Since we thought psychology, sociology, and all the other social sciences were inferior disciplines because they could not prove their hypotheses with econometrics, so we never bothered to accept their insights into human behavior. The result is that we thought markets were self-correcting, industries were self-regulated, and markets punished those who took decisions against the public interest. We saw the “irrational exuberance” of the dot-com bubble and then did nothing when a bigger bubble, the subprime housing bubble, sprung up almost immediately after the first one popped.

We called anyone who disagreed a socialist.

And finally, we assumed we had all the answers. We took the view of Noble laureate Robert Lucas that the “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades”. This was just five years before the global financial crisis. We also poisoned the minds of politicians, who adopted our elegant yet simplistic neoclassical view of how the world worked. We flooded bookstores with titles like Freakonomics and The Economic Naturalist: How Economics Explains Everything to educate the masses on why we knew better. We were conceited, arrogant, and frankly, fucking annoying.

We called anyone who disagreed a socialist.

Then on June 23rd we wondered how the British could be so stupid as to want to leave the EU. On November 8th we were even more perplexed on how Americans could be dumb enough to vote for someone like Trump. From our little intellectual ivory towers, the framework in which we understood the world was perfectly fine. We didn’t get that we didn’t get it.

And now with the twin shocks of a global crisis in 2008-09 and a political crisis in 2016, our world has been shattered. Probably irremediably. But we don’t know it yet. This will still be blamed on people (deplorable as they may be), rather than the structures that conditioned them to be that way. And we’ll be scratching our heads into oblivion by failing to understand why a laid off steelworker from Pennsylvania or miner from Yorkshire won’t be voting with rapturous joy for the man or woman who promises free trade agreements, minority rights, and open immigration in place of the only thing that really matters to them: dignity.

(The author wishes to note that he has stood against everything that has been criticized in this piece since his days as an undergrad. And if you think he is a socialist, well, you’re pretty much the type of person he wrote this for)

I am not exaggerating when I say that Mad Max: Fury Road is possibly one of the best movies I have seen in my adult life. The high-octane adrenaline-fueled frenzy of non-stop car chase action would be spectacular in itself; that it is also makes emotional, political and philosophical statements in its two amazing hours absolutely shatters the idea that action movies are necessarily mindless and superficial. Its overt feminist undertones have been well documented, and like all the previous Mad Max movies delivers a powerful message about humanity and redemption. What more can you ask for in a summer blockbuster?

Could Mad Max also be a sublime statement on economics? One of the key elements of any dystopian/post-apocalyptic film is that it has to be somewhat believable, and for this to be achieved, there needs to be a realistic depiction of the way society arranges its economic exchanges. After watching Fury Road and then re-watching the original trilogy, it has struck me that each film has a progressively complex economic structure that could well be a coincidence. But with George Miller coincidences rarely exist and perhaps the old man has put even deeper meaning into the franchise that most people have thought.

Are you believer in the free market fundamentalist school of economic theory? If you are, then 2014 must have been a crap year. The main reason was the publication in English on what has now turned to be one of the seminal works of economics of our generation: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Let’s understand the magnitude of this. A French economist, yes French, wrote a 700-page monolith of a tome in one of the most mind-numbingly boring subjects known to humankind and turned it into a New York Times bestseller. Presumably many of the thousands of people who bought Piketty’s book probably have never bought, much less read, an economics book in their lifetime. Maybe they didn’t even read it from start to finish (this blogger must confess, he has neither bought it nor read it) but, hey, it’s the thought that counts.

L’enfant terrible of economics

I cannot emphasize enough the he’s French bit. If there’s any country whose economic intelligentsia has been vilified by the Ivy League-bred doges of the economics profession, it is France. Yes, there’s a handful of world-renowned French economists like former IMF chief economist Oliver Blanchard and this year’s Nobel Laureate Jean Tirole, but for the most part these have comfortably fit into the “system”, and only challenged it at the margins, if at all. Certainty none of them has launched the kind of broadside that Piketty did in Capital, a book which uncovers free market capitalism’s ugly face: that of a system which naturally gravitates towards the accumulation of wealth by the owners of capital. Rather than see the two most recent periods of massive rises in global inequality (the so-called “guilded ages” before the 1929 and 2008 crashes) as oddities, Piketty has painted them as the baseline: the social-democratic golden age in the post-WW2 decades is in fact, a one-off, in which the trauma of war forced Western governments to redistribute wealth to a degree that had never been done before or since. Continue reading →

I have already ranted before about how I feel the meaning of democracy has been lost in the modern era but I feel even more needs to get off my chest. For the past three decades we have lived in a world that has essentially bastardized the idea that government is “for the people” and that it involves the “rule of the many”. Much of it has to do with the economization of politics; in other words, policies that result in economically efficient outcomes or that promote freedom of choice are necessarily those that deepen democracy. Even at the height of the financial crisis in 2008, George W. Bush summarized this belief best: “If you seek economic growth, if you seek opportunity, if you seek social justice and human dignity, the free market system is the way to go.” How deep this belief was ingrained in mainstream thought that one of his advisers and also one of the most cited economists of our day, Gregory Mankiw, echoed these sentiments almost to the letter: “Free markets remain the best way to promote growth, create good jobs, and ensure rising living standards”.

For those of us who fortunately did not get brainwashed by free market fundamentalism, the unraveling of the Reagan-Thatcher consensus after the 2008-09 crisis has become an intellectual vindication served on a silver platter. Unfortunately, despite the overwhelming evidence that macroeconomic policymaking since the 1980s has been counterproductive to growth, we’re still far away from obtaining a consensus in believing that it has also fundamentally destroyed the way that democratic societies function. Why? Because too much of the population and too much of academia still believes in certain nonsense dogmas that have been passed on through generations of teachers and students, mentors and apprentices. Like a religion, there is an overwhelming sense of guilt at abandoning these dogmas; not least because in a society that frowns upon error (especially in academia), admitting you’ve been wrong all along is a one-way ticket to professional disgrace. Continue reading →

The Economics Nobel has always been somewhat of an oddity compared to its more illustrious (or should I say, less dismal) counterparts in the natural sciences, literature and peace. First and foremost, it really isn’t a true Nobel Prize: it is awarded by the Swedish Central Bank in memory of Albert Nobel, for Mr Nobel himself didn’t see the need to give an economist such grand an accolade. But more curiously, it is the one prize in which two people can be awarded the prize for saying the exact opposite thing since economics, by its virtue of a social science, is essentially never right (and as more than one economist would like to think, never wrong either). This happened early in the prize’s history when Gunnar Myrdal, one of the foremost social-democratic thinkers of his time, shared it in 1974 with none other than F. A. von Hayek, the intellectual godfather of the Austrian school of free-market loving economists. Fast forward to 2013 and history has repeated itself, this time even more blatantly by giving it to Eugene Fama who authored the Efficient Market Hypothesis, and Robert J. Shiller who has spent his academic career destroying it.

Eugene Fama created a monster, and got the Nobel in return

Perhaps all that the Nobel Committee wanted was to stir some controversy. It has after all, given the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama because he wasn’t George W. Bush, even if he ended up conducting an even more intense drone strike campaign than Dubya himself. It also gave it to the European Union for not annihilating itself, since that has been the norm in Europe since the collapse of the Roman Empire. This year’s dubious recipient seemed to be yet again the Peace Prize, awarded the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, probably because giving it to Vladimir Putin directly would have been even too appalling for the fellows in Oslo. Yet in my view, giving Eugene Fama the Economics Nobel came nearly as bad. I will certainly not deny that the Efficient Markets Hypothesis has been one of the basic frameworks upon which financial economics has rested since Fama’s seminal 1970’s paper that formalized it. Yet at the same time, it may well have been one of the biggest intellectual frauds ever imposed on (and by) the economics profession. Continue reading →